Colleen Kim Daniher is a writer, teacher, scholar, and maker of performance. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University; she has held previous appointments at San Francisco State University, Brown University, and Amherst College. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University; she also holds an MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph and concurrent undergraduate degrees in English and Music from Western University in Ontario, Canada.
Dr. Daniher’s research spans Asia and the Americas and focuses on the consolidation and contestation of categories of race, gender, and nation through performance practices from the age of 19th-century “new” imperialisms to the present. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the mixed-race femme performer and the colonial cartographies of popular American entertainment. She has also started work on a new project on performances of “tropical” Asia, spotlighting maritime Southeast Asia in particular.
Her scholarship has been recognized and supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the American Society for Theatre Research. Her articles have appeared in or are forthcoming from Theatre Journal, TDR, Women & Performance, e-misférica, Theatre Research in Canada, and Canadian Theatre Review. She is also the co-editor (with Katherine Zien) of a special issue on “Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands” in Theatre Research in Canada. In 2021, her article “Looking at Pauline Johnson: Gender, Race, and Delsartism’s Legible Body” won the Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Dr. Daniher’s research and teaching are informed by a commitment to integrating performance practice and theory. Her performance-based artist training spans a degree in classical music (Voice), amateur musical theatre performance, devised theatre dramaturgy and directing, and multimedia solo performance art.
Colleen Kim Daniher 